It’s the Thursday after Tax Day… do you know where your tax dollars are?
It’s a tough question. While most Americans have a general idea about the federal budget, one of the most concerning issues for taxpayers is exactly how our tax dollars are being spent. The federal budget has been available online for years but it had been nearly impossible to translate those numbers into an understanding of how individual tax dollars are divvied up.
That all changed in 2011 with the introduction of the “Federal Taxpayer Receipt.” Now, you can enter your information into the web site and with a few clicks, see where your federal tax dollars go.
I don’t have my 2013 tax bill handy (we’re on extension) so I decided to give the calculator a whirl using one of the pre-selected scenarios. I purposefully selected “$50,000 with one child” since, for the last tax year that complete statistics are available (2011), the largest segment of the filing population reported gross income of between $50,000 and $75,000.
That resulted in taxes of $3,100 for Social Security, $725 for Medicare, and $1,776 in federal income tax.
The single biggest expenditure is health care, which is largely attributable to Medicaid and Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) and Medicare doctor payments and prescription drug payments, followed by national defense.
The next biggest chunk of your tax dollar doesn’t go to programs at all but to interest. That’s right: interest payments. We have to pay all of those debts we owe back, right?
After interest payments, your tax dollars go to job and family security payments, which include unemployment payments and food and housing assistance followed by veteran’s benefits.
What’s at the bottom of the spending priority list? We spend the least dollars on Community, Area, and Regional Development and Response to Natural Disasters. We also spend relatively small dollars on Science, Space, and Technology Programs and Agriculture.
The federal taxpayer receipt – while not incredibly detailed – does offer a pretty succinct snapshot of where tax dollars go. It’s an interesting conversation starter, too… So, what do you think? Is it on par with where you expected your dollars to go?
